


Crow Pose

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [22]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Loki (Marvel) is Sneaky, Lullabies, Reader-Insert, Yoga
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:01:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23692804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: Loki catches you making your best attempts at yoga.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 7
Kudos: 196





	Crow Pose

About a month into being unable to leave your apartment, you took up yoga.

Well, sort of. Going a little stir-crazy from not being able to get to the gym and not really feeling entirely comfortable walking on the streets, you’d turned to exercise videos that you found online. Most of them ended up being too loud, or requiring things that you simply didn’t own, but yoga was easy enough, quiet enough, and the way it stretched your muscles and made them burn was satisfying. You turned the videos on quietly in the morning, when you were awake and ready for the day but Loki wasn’t. This felt incredibly personal to you, kind of private. As reverently as he looked at you, touched you, in the dark, you weren’t entirely willing to let him watch you trying to match the instructors’ graceful poses.

You had a few favorite videos and often worked through each of them in succession each morning. It was hard to tell if you were making much progress on a day-to-day basis, and you didn’t really notice a change in the way your clothing fit you, but many of the poses did eventually become easier for you. Watching the videos gave you brief moments of peace, complete with a physical buffer against the weird surge of anxiety that you often felt when you were simply breathing deeply. Instead, yoga gave your deep breathing a purpose: you were not just taking in air in order to calm a racing heart, but to fuel your muscles as they worked. You were not trying to completely empty your mind of all thought so silence could echo in the cavern of your brain, but directing your focus towards what your body was doing and how it felt. There was a part of you that still missed being able to get on an elliptical at the gym, of course, but you found yourself growing more and more appreciative of yoga.

You were in the middle of a reverse warrior pose when you heard the bedroom door open. It took every ounce of self-control, but you didn’t reach over to slam your computer closed. Maybe he was just going to the bathroom. You closed your eyes and drew in another deep breath, trying to breathe into the stretch in your ribcage even as you trained your ears on Loki’s movements. 

The video guided you through to the third warrior pose, and you had to concentrate on the alignment of your body instead. You often wondered whether these yoga practices would have more of a benefit for you if you could get a giant full-length mirror so you could study your own form, but the idea of that—of having the mirror in the apartment when you weren’t in the middle of yoga—made you nervous. Instead, you had to do your best to simply feel your body, to try to determine whether your leg and torso were parallel to the floor without looking.

Not long after you felt that fire ignite in your core muscles, the instructor moved along, guiding you through the rest of that now-familiar sequence. Loki was showering. That got rid of a bit of your uncertainty, and you were able to return your attention to your body and what was happening. This particular instructor was a little too giddy for your preferences. She took just a little too much joy in what she did. But her voice was gentle enough, and her sequence was challenging enough, that you kind of just sucked it up and did what she did.

Crow pose was often your downfall. It was hard to know whether the issues were more physical or more mental, but you didn’t exactly trust your body enough to believe that you could get your feet in the air while you rested your knees on the backs of your arms. The instructor in the video giggled each time about people who were afraid of falling, and pulled out a thick foam block that she said you could use if you didn’t want to tip forward, but you did not have a block like that. Most often, when you watched this video, you did your own thing while she floated there in the air, and caught back up with her when she was finished.

Today, you gave it your best attempt. You’d been getting a little bit stronger, after all, and if you never tried, you’d never know. You kept your body tucked-in and rounded, brought your knees up the backs of your arms, and made sure to keep your gaze outwards, instead of staring at your hands. You felt a little shaky, and you were absolutely certain that your body looked nothing like the instructor’s, but you were in the air, at least! Her words faded into the background as you tried to breathe into the pose, but mostly you just enjoyed the rush of accomplishment.

The rest of the sequence was pretty much a blur. She talked you through hip-openers and then cool-downs, and then finally the corpse pose. In a lot of ways, this last pose was the hardest one. You had to stretch out on your back and breathe to release tension from your mind and your body. It was supposed to be something like meditation, but your brain simply moved too quickly for it to feel right. Sometimes you could distract yourself by telling yourself to focus on the instructor’s voice, but often your thoughts crept in and told you that that was cheating, that you were supposed to be focused on yourself. Often, at the end of corpse pose, when the instructor said how recharged she felt and asked the viewers to subscribe to her channel, you just felt harried and stressed again.

Today was a little bit easier. Still on a bit of a high from finally getting that damn crow pose, it was easier to tell yourself that you could do the corpse pose. You checked in on each part of your body, releasing the tension and breathing into those parts in order to further relax them. Your mind raced as it always did, but instead of beating yourself up about it, you found that you could calmly bring yourself back to peace. You didn’t do the full ten minutes that the instructor always recommended. Maybe you never would. But after a while, you opened your eyes and sat up, working your neck even as you closed the window on your computer. 

The shower wasn’t running anymore. That thought occurred to you only moments before you heard Loki’s footsteps padding quietly towards you on the rug. He was smiling faintly as he bent down to kiss you. There was almost something like guilt in his eyes. 

“How long were you watching?” Maybe you didn’t really want to know the answer to that, but you couldn’t keep yourself from asking anyway. Sure enough, he ducked his head a little more guiltily and ran his fingers through his damp hair.

“A while. I walked in while you were doing that thing with your feet in the air? I wanted to say something, but I didn’t want to startle you.” He sat down beside you and stretched to touch his toes. “And then maybe I just wanted to enjoy the view.” Your face burned so hot that you had to cover it with your hands. He’d seen all that. He’d just stood there and watched as you tried to make your own body do things that the pretty, elastic instructor did so easily. He reached out to tug on one of your wrists, pulling one hand down so he could enfold it with his own hands. “The strength of your body is remarkable, love.”

You tried not to, but you couldn’t stop the humorless snort that puffed out of you. “Didn’t you see the girl on the screen? She’s so much better than I am.” Maybe you were only just now realizing that there may have been another reason you wanted to hide these videos from Loki. 

“I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking at you.” His voice was heavy with meaning, but you still couldn’t look him in the eye. After a moment, he growled and pushed you to the ground so he could stretch out over you. “Every inch of your body calls out to me. Do you know how hard it was for me to quietly watch you instead of coming to put my hands on you? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you so strong or so balanced, but it made me _want_ you.” There was a rasp in his voice that you recognized—he was telling the truth. Unsure what to say, you reached up to pull his lips down to yours so you could kiss him. His weight pressed into you, grounding you, steadying you in a way that corpse pose lacked. When he finally broke the kiss, he pulled away just far enough that you felt his lips continue to brush against yours as he spoke. “Do you do this _every_ morning?”

You laughed at the quiet, wondrous tone in his voice and combed your fingers through his hair. “You’re only asking because you want to creep on me every morning, aren’t you?”

His only response was another growl, deeper and hungrier, as he lovingly attacked your neck with his lips and teeth.


End file.
